June 16, 2009
I just read an article, conveniently provided by nytimes.com, that I found under the heading of Modern Love, which had so interested me a few days ago. Turns out, Modern Love had risen to number 1 in popularity. Could it be because it’s a Tuesday?
The point I liked, and am holding onto to turn over in my head, is something about love being a verb and not a noun. Love as a noun is often experienced retrospectively or from the outside. You hear about someone who found love like you find a rock or a shell. I have rocks and shells all over my apartment—it’s sort of a compulsion. The comparison is a little jarring. You find your love rock, dust it off, are pleased with yourself for having spotted it, take it home, and leave it on your table or your shelf. Odds are, when you go back to it however many days or months later, it won’t have changed much. If we’re playing the mad-lib game, “I don’t know much about love but _____.” I would fill in “I know that it changes.” Maybe that’s why some people find the love rock, take it home, leave it there, come back and are shocked that it’s changed. The love is different, it’s not as you remembered, or in some cases it’s just plain gone. I’ve never mourned over misplacing a shell or a rock. I guess that’s a key difference.
How convenient, though, to find your love rock: fully formed and ready to go. I had a love rock last year. What I picked up, from a restaurant and not a beach, turned out to be pretty much a fully formed, instant relationship. It was noun love. Unfortunately, it was a noun that didn’t translate over distance. How do I carry that metaphor forward? I lost the love rock? He threw it away? I’m turning in circles trying to find its logical conclusion. In any event, for whatever reason, this was one of those “just plain gone” cases.
But what about verb love? I’m engaging in an ambivalent friendship with a guy I met several months ago… the situation is all wrong, and for some odd and novel reason, my heart is listening to the case my head is making. There is no particular noun between us, but there are many verbs, which are a lot less complicated at the moment than trying to foster an ill-fitting noun. It is easy at the moment to just verb, but I long, if unadvisedly, for the noun; something to hold up to the light and admire. How sad.
I met someone this morning at my bus stop, someone who is inevitably in a relationship, which I judge from noting that his dachshund had a pink harness on. But I found him, if only briefly. The possibility of an anecdotal meeting creates the ghost of a noun, a rock, a story I am writing that is nothing but fiction. I know that I will never see him again, and if I do, he and his dachshund will be accompanied by their mutual love (insert suitably irritating woman’s name). Nevertheless, the ghost of the noun keeps me warm this morning. That could be because it’s a Tuesday.
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